Conventional time series data collection systems, such as illustrated in FIG. 1, include remotely located data collection terminals 10-14, which could be microcomputers or simple digital sampling systems. Such systems in response to a request from a computer 16, obtain data from sensors 18-22 and serially transmit that data to the computer 16 over a communication network 24 which could be a private dedicated network or a network which uses the public telephone system. A typical response from a terminal will include a terminal number, a date and time of the data sample, the data, a time interval over which the data was collected and a data type. The typical response will have a length of approximately fourteen bytes. As the data, which could amount to thousands of samples per second, is collected from the terminals 10-14, it is stored by the computer 16 in a storage unit 26, such as a hard magnetic disk, and organized as a vertical file where each fixed length record 28 corresponds to a sampling time "T" each terminal "a" corresponds to an entry 30 in that record and the data "d" collected from each terminal corresponds to fields 32 within that entry. Of course, it is possible for the data collected during any one time period to be stored in a separate time file and, if so, the terminal responses would be records and the data collected from each terminal would be the entries within the record. The data collected and stored by this type of conventional system is typically data, such as weather data, which is collected from many remote locations and analyzed at a central location, such as the National Weather Service. Once this data is collected, it is common practice for a user to display the data graphically on a display 34 or print the data using a printer. However, the user sometimes prefers to view the data organized by terminal or location rather than by time as the data is originally stored. The user also sometimes prefers to display the data from plural locations at the same time to allow visual comparison of various locations. Such a display 36, produced by conventional software, is illustrated in FIG. 1 where rain, temperature and pollution data graphs for 4 locations are displayed at the same time. The generation of this display 36 requires a considerable amount of time because the data as displayed is organized very differently from the data as it is stored. For example, to collate the data for the rain "d1" at the Osaka data collection terminal "a1" over a period of time and display that data as a graph requires that the computer 16 access and store, in a file, the entry 30 and data field 32 in each record 28 corresponding to the Osaka terminal within the time window desired and provide that data or file to a conventional graphics package. Searching for and locating the desired data can be very time consuming since the search is typically sequential. This operation must be repeated for each one of the data types and locations to be displayed as requested by the user. The individual graphic displays are then passed to a conventional window display package which produces the contents of each of the windows in the display 36. If the user then decides that the arrangement of graphs on the display 34 should be different, as illustrated by the display 38 in FIG. 1 where the display locations and data types have been rearranged, the computer 16 must start over by reading the vertical file 28.
The problem with the slow access time and the inefficient use of the computer resources, as discussed above, becomes even worse when the system allows the user to select different portions of the display 38 for output to either a printer or to be sent to a remote location display over the network 24. For example, the user may want to display the Kawasaki rain data with the Tokyo rain data and send that information to a Tokyo office and then display the Osaka and Nagoya rain data and send that to a different office. This situation involves a still further reorganization of the data and thus starting the process over again with the access to the vertical file 28.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a system which does not require sequential search of time records in a vertical file to collate terminal data. It is also an object of the present invention to provide a system that includes an intermediate horizontal file of data sorted by terminal. It is another object of the present invention to store time series data in a database having multiple dimensions allowing efficient multidimensional searches. It is an object of the present invention to provide increased data security by storing both vertical and horizontal files which duplicate the stored data. It is a further object of the present invention to provide a system that allows related data on a display to be freely rearranged without requiring substantial computer search time.